Objectives:

Examine the relationships among structural disadvantage, friendship network age composition, and violent offending by investigating the contextual and individual etiology of affiliating with older friends and exploring the mechanisms that link friendship network age composition to violent offending.

Method:

Hierarchical linear models analyze 8,481 respondents distributed across 1,485 census tracts from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Social network data are used to construct a measure of the proportion of a respondent’s friendship network that is at least one grade older than the respondent.

Results:

Consistent with hypotheses, structural disadvantage increases affiliations with older friends, older friendship networks report higher levels of violence, and affiliating with older friends increases violence among respondents. Contrary to expectations, the influence of affiliating with older friends on respondent violence decreases, rather than increases, as levels of violence in the friendship network increase.

Conclusions:

The results shed light on the inextricable linkages among social context, friendship network composition, and sociobehavioral outcomes among youth. The findings inform peer mentoring program evaluations observing iatrogenic effects via peer deviancy.

中文翻译：

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住宅景观是否将友谊融为背景？审查与老友关系的原因和后果

目标：

通过调查与年长朋友有联系的背景和个人病因，并探索将友谊网络年龄组成与暴力犯罪联系起来的机制，来检查结构性劣势，友谊网络年龄构成和暴力犯罪之间的关系。

方法：

分层线性模型分析了从全国青少年纵向研究到成人健康研究的1,485个人口普查区域中的8,481位受访者。社交网络数据用于构建比受访者年龄至少高一个等级的受访者友谊网络所占比例的度量。

结果：

与假设一致的是，结构性劣势增加了与老年朋友的联系，老年友谊网络报告了较高的暴力程度，与老年朋友的联系增加了受访者之间的暴力行为。与期望相反，随着友谊网络中暴力程度的增加，与年长朋友的联属关系对被告人暴力的影响减少而不是增加。

结论：

结果揭示了青年之间的社会背景，友谊网络组成和社会行为成果之间密不可分的联系。这些发现为同行辅导计划的评估提供了参考，该评估通过同行异常观察了医源性影响。